


Of Phantoms and Nothings

by TheGirlUnderTheRiver



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: AU, Imprisonment, Insanity, M/M, Madness, Past Torture, Self Harm, Slow Build, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-06
Updated: 2014-03-05
Packaged: 2018-01-14 17:24:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1274809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGirlUnderTheRiver/pseuds/TheGirlUnderTheRiver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Master wanders, aimlessly, kept in the TARDIS, a dog to be fed lest his corpse bother the neighbors. </p>
<p>But The Doctor doesn't see it that way.</p>
<p>AU Wherein The Master doesn't die on the Valiant. How original, I know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Phantoms and Nothings

**Author's Note:**

> And, out of endeavor  
>  To change and to flow,  
>  The gas become solid,  
>  And phantoms and nothings.  
>  -Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Master wanders, aimlessly. 

For weeks, voice lost and eyes adrift, going down tunnels and through chambers without observing in the least where they lead him or what they contain. His feet ache, but he is despondent. He mustn’t’ stop walking. The louder his footsteps get, the more they drown out the drums that chase and echo louder than ever before. 

In the beginning, when the TARDIS doors first closed, The Master lashed out, left dark flowers wilting on The Doctor’s skin as he tried to escape from his endless prison. He was not so quiet and lonely.

“Let me go! I don’t want this! Don’t do this Theta!” His fists were skinned from beating against the door, bruised from flattening The Doctor’s cheekbones and broken from too much impact against unforgiving surfaces. It had been so long since he had hurt The Doctor, brutally, physically, and the rage he felt from it all felt pure. 

The Doctor let him. Didn’t fight. Didn’t cry like he used to on the Valiant, no longer sniffing sullenly and letting tears slip down his dirty cheeks. No…not anymore. He just was. He just let it happen, until the TARDIS called enough and let out a wounded cry and pitched sharply to the left, throwing The Master away from the Oncoming Storm, who lay with bruised ribs on the grated floor of the console room.

“Master, I can’t, you know I can’t let you go, it’s not safe-“The Doctor simply looks at the other Time Lord, eyes caught in an emotion somewhere between sorrow and pity, hands massaging the bruises that had already begun to darken on his face.

“I’m not safe you mean!” The Master spat, “You prefer your little human friends, dull as they are. But they’ll never have you now that they know that I am part of your species, now that you’ve saved me rather than them, now that you’ve taken me in like a stray-“

“Stop, stop this, Master, stop it. I can help you. Let me try, at least.” The Doctor let a hand curl about his ribs as if to hold broken shards in place as he stood, eyes squeezing shut from the pain of it all.

“It hurts you doesn’t it?” The Master drawled, “Keeping me here.” 

The Doctor nodded and looked up at The Master with those swirled, dark eyes. 

The Master would quite like to keep those eyes, after The Doctor regenerates, would like to preserve them and stare into them every now and then and think of his most awful enemy.

“Please, Master, let me save-“ 

The Master threw his arms into the air, spun once to glare at the door. Out there, he was a god among men, pulling heartstrings like a cellist, playing throats like violins and blowing bones into castles and dust. But in here, faced with isomorphic controls and locked doors and endless rooms, he is nothing, a dog to be fed and taken care of lest his corpse begin to bother the neighbors. 

The Master felt The Doctor move closer, felt the warmth of him near his left arm, felt those long fingers reaching…

The Doctor let his fingers slip into The Master’s, twisted their bones into knots thick as brambles. 

“Just let me go.” The Master asked, one final time, “I’ll be boring, I swear. I won’t do anything. I’ll live on Saphoristana, or in the Delta M galaxy, nothing ever happens there-“

“That entire solar system has been at war for 1298 years.”

The Master sighed, “Isn’t there anywhere quiet left in this damned universe?” 

The Doctor slid a hand into his trouser pocket, “Well… the TARDIS gets pretty quiet sometimes.”

“Yeah… But I suppose nothing could be quiet anymore, what with the drums and all that.”

The Doctor didn’t say anything, just stood there with The Master, watching the closed door, knowing it was true. 

But there they stood, the last Time Lords. The final two, in the last TARDIS, gliding somewhere behind Waristano’s 12th moon in the endless void of the universe. How small they seemed in that moment, bound together like friends but minds racing with thoughts of torture and turmoil and wars. 

No, in the beginning, The Master was not so quiet and lost. He was fiery and angry, spat abuse like flame and used his fists like coals, broke The Doctor’s bones and let his heart race with the abandon of a cracking man. But The Master never wept, never let his defenses break so completely.  
But he let The Doctor hold him. 

For a few heartbeats, a tattered, stolen second, The Master simply let his ear rest against The Doctor’s chest. The Doctor didn’t have time to wrap his arms around the younger Time Lord, before Great Britain’s former Prime Minister broke the embrace and slithered into the churning and chugging guts of the TARDIS, his breath pulling like the sails on a ship. 

The Doctor watched him go, knowing that there were too many doors in The Master’s head. Some of them he couldn’t close. Some never opened. And some had music drifting softly onto the air from the crack under the door…

In those moments, The Doctor swore he could hear The Master’s carefully carved mask slipping like paint from a metal wall. There had been many blows to that mask over the past few days. The bullet, the fall of the toclafane, losing Lucy though he could never care about her the way he cared for the power and finally… this. 

More closed doors.   
*  
The Doctor lost track of The Master for some time, knowing he was still alive (as the TARDIS scanned for life forms whenever The Doctor and The Master were not in the same room) but never knowing exactly where the other Time Lord was. Until The Doctor went searching.  
He finds him in the lower quadrants, past the library and beyond the secondary console chamber. 

The Master stumbles vacantly down hallways shaped like hourglasses and into rooms that snowed silently, hardly noticing there was ever a change in temperature or in gravity relations. He has abandoned his minister attire, having found the relaxed space of faded jeans and a dusty blue t-shirt more comfortable for walking around in than white silk and black velvet. 

Like this, The Master looks paper thin and one-dimensional, grey and crooked, simply a ghost of his formal self. It has been years since The Doctor has seen him so small.

The Doctor follows him, like a shadow down the tunnels and into rooms The Doctor himself had forgotten were there. An entire room filled with empty bookcases adopts the vacuum silence of an empty chapel (The Doctor later recalls when he wanted to have two grand libraries instead of just one, but gave up when there he received an invitation to an elite circus that only allowed members of extinct species to attend (it turned out to be an illegal brothel) soon forgetting the room was there at all). The Doctor watches as The Master looks up at the domed ceiling, lips parted slightly in detached wonder, hand trailing across a bay bookshelf heavy with sawdust. 

The Master glances at The Doctor for the first time, who stands in the entrance, and without a word walks away, looking for another door. There is no fever in his steps, he is a fluid in his movements as he has always been. 

The subtle curve of his spine and the deft hunch of his shoulders catches the light that blooms from the domed ceiling, and for a gleaming moment the shadows on his face darken and the shade of The Master, the true, evil Master returns, until he glides out of the light and becomes the shards of Harold Saxon once more.

The Master finds a door behind a bookshelf, a plain, black door with a simple copper handle. The Doctor watches The Master bend the knob and push the door open. 

The Master pauses as a light sweeps in through the doorway, brows furrowed in confusion and wonderment. The Doctor smiles lightly as The Master looks around at his captor.

“Seriously?” The Master asks.

The Doctor smirks with half of his face and nods. He knows what lies beyond the doorway. 

He built it just after Rose slipped from his hands like sand. The rose garden itself is a marvelous thing, smelling thickly of dew and the sweetness of pollen. He crafted it to be a perfect replica of the garden in Davorsairia, belonging to the High Priestess of the Dreamer Fall, even plucked some roses from the original garden’s patches. The TARDIS did the rest, crafted a thousand roses from the single flower The Doctor lay upon her console, built a garden for him with wrought iron gates, shingled paths and a fake sun to make the flowers grow.

The TARDIS was a careful, calculating creature, but she knew grief when she saw it.

The Master laughs softly, leaning on the doorknob, “What would you do if I burned it?”

The Doctor’s face falls, hearts clenching, “Please… don’t…” The smile slips off his face as soon as it had appeared. He often sits in the rose garden, breathes deeply and listens to the bees he brought on board work away, wakes early to watch the petals unfurl like wings in the glow of the rising ‘sun’ that is simply a mirage. The Harold Saxon mask The Master wears so well fades and reveals the hard lines of the real Master once more. 

The Doctor cannot decide if he is happy to see his foe so much like his old self, or if he is afraid. 

“But what would you do?” The Master presses, “Bend me over your knee like a child? Beat me like a man? Lock me in a room until I claw my skin off in wet strips-“

“Stop please,” The Doctor says, squinting and pushing the thoughts away, “I’d never-“

“But you would, wouldn’t you?” The Master sings.

“No. I wouldn’t. I never would. I would never do that to you, you’re too dear to me.”

“Dear to you?!” The Master exclaims, “How can a warden ever find worth in a prisoner? Soon, Doctor, I know you will deny it until the moment you happen upon it, but someday soon you will hate me for the things I do, one day you will and watch me regenerate over and over until all that remains is a glowing body of bones, all of it at your hand. One day I will break away the pieces of you that lust for wandering and adventure and will shatter your bones with my teeth until all that is left of you is the man that burned Gallifrey. What a day that must have been, watching the flames and the fires scorch over the Citadel, you must have been a god in the light of the embers that night. What if I brought those memories to the fore front of your mind once more? Dug them from the depths of that dusty old head of yours? Would you hate me then? Would you kill me then?”

The Master breathes heavily, chest rising and falling like a ship over waves, energy spent in the argument. And then he slips beneath whatever madness festers beneath his breast bone and looks back into garden.

The Doctor breathes sharply as he watches The Master slip back into the drumbeat.

What pieces remain of The Master looks hard into the doorway to the garden, sighs deeply and looks at The Doctor again as if he is seeing him for the first time, and that he sees some kind of revelation or profound thought hidden behind The Doctor’s eyes.

“No…” He says softly, “You wouldn’t, would you?”

He slips through the doorway, not bothering to close it. 

The Doctor doesn’t follow.  
*  
The Master is a profound creature, The Doctor thinks.

Sometimes he is a flame, flickering and blistering with his heat and his rage, becoming as bright as a bonfire and as burning as a torch. The Time War did that to him. The battles broke the fire pit that caged his anger and let the flames take the rest. It was always there before, but after the Time Lords brought him back, he was gorged on ember and soot, walked to the drumbeat that followed him out of war like a shadow.

Other times he is a child, whimpering and afraid of things he cannot escape, cowering in some dark corner as if the seclusion will mend the scars the percussion of his heart leaves bruised upon his ribcage. 

But the silence doesn’t help him. The silence swallows the sobs and licks away the tears.

But other times he is just… Koschei. 

Other times he is cool, calm, the person The Doctor knew on Gallifrey. But that person hardly ever appears now, because someone else has taken over The Master’s new body. 

No… Other times The Master is a muted, greyscale beast that inhabits a hollow shell of a once great friend. Something that prowls the endless corridors of the TARDIS searching for something The Doctor cannot quite name, allowing the real Master to show himself only in times of anger before slipping back into the watery body he inhabits. 

It is the last one The Doctor fears most of all, because he knows that the quieter The Master becomes, the more he allows the drums to infect him. 

Like an illness. 

That’s what the drums are, in truth. Some parasite someone else gave The Master, that raged and slaughtered everything good and whole that ever lived inside the Time Lord called The Master. 

All that is left is the sickness, nothing more.   
*  
The first time The Master hurts himself, it’s a Wednesday. Or, so The Doctor thinks. He’s never really bothered paying attention to the days. But he remembers this one. He’ll never forget it. 

They’d left Waristano for the Vortex, slipping into times and galaxies at random, a destination scrambler. At the time, they floated near Callisto. The Doctor has given up staying away, pats a hand across the console before following the beacon of The Master through the many chambers and corridors of the lower levels. It takes him 4 hours to find him, and on the way he finds the most unusual things littered about his ship. 

A room completely devoted parsnips.

Another filled to the bursting with tentacles. 

And one that is empty, but smells faintly of ash.

And in an empty room save for a broken light bulb and a box cutter, sitting cross legged, is The Master. Bleeding, torn to tatters, head tipping and eyelids slipping shut, he is Harold Saxon once more, a one dimensional being of dust and song. 

“Master…” The Doctor is by his side in a heartbeat, applying pressure to The Master’s frail arms and lifting him. The Master pushes against him softly, hands bloodied and eyes pale and sliding open. 

“No…” He sighs, “Stop… Jus… Just leave me.” 

The TARDIS shifts around them, shortens corridors and rearranges rooms until The Doctor finds himself in the makeshift medical bay, folding The Master onto the cool examination table with haste and worry. 

The Doctor feels pity then, and rage. Pity for The Master, in knowing that he himself caused this, that the man drew the blade across his skin to either end the pain or cause it, but either way, it is The Doctor’s fault. Anger, now that is what The Doctor cannot quite place. It uncurls and spits between his hearts, bright and blistering, slipping into every vein and lancing through every thought. 

“Why… Why did you do this?” He hisses into the bandages that he winds thickly over The Master’s arms, “Why would you hurt me like this, why would you-“

The Master tips his head over the side of the table and vomits hoarsely, all over the floor before shivering and succumbing to the exhaustion, which trips The Doctor out of his whispered rant of ‘whys’ and ‘how could yous’. For a moment, for one abstract moment, The Doctor stares at the ghost that looks like his friend. 

That looks like his lover. 

That looks like everything he has ever lost, bundled shoddily beneath a single pair of hooded eyes. 

But a moment is only a moment. It passes.

The anger furls its wings again. The pity clouds him. 

So, The Doctor goes about what he does best; he heals. He spirals the bandages about The Master’s too-thin wrists, prepares the rosaries, finds an IV and taps it into The Master’s veins but he adds no painkillers. 

He does not know why…


End file.
